The conjunction of print and political revolutions between 1770 and 1820 generated a body of literary history writing whose competing narratives serve functions distinct from the consolidating and regulatory ones implicit in the genre's modern identification with canonicity. This first full-length investigation of period literary history argues that it accommodated adversarial positions as well as consensus, spoke to multiple readerships, fostered provisionality along with the search for certainty, and advanced a sense of historical locatedness. After 1820, however, its mediatory powers withered in response to the ascendancy of literary criticism, unease about the numbers and diversity of readers, and the perception of a national crisis post-Peterloo. Drawing on collective biography, memoir, antiquarianism, the novel, secret history, specimens, reviews and Institutional lectures, the study invites a fundamental rethinking of the place of literary history in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century print culture, and hence in the wider social and political movements it was both shaped by and itself helped shape.

'...[a] wide-ranging, thoroughly researched study....[and] a panoramic exploration of an emergent genre that became instrumental to the teaching of English literature.' - Max Fincher, TLS

'...an impressive and long overdue 'history of literary history' from 1770-1820. Combining the intricacies of close reading with the larger historical perspectives of material and book history, it carefully and scrupulously navigates the much-neglected waters of the period's literary history.' - Porscha Fermanis, University College Dublin, British Association for Romantic Studies

'What re-emerges as the result of London's survey is a story of the 'hardening of genre borders' (p. 5) first between history and literature, and eventually between genres within literature and literary studies, which emptied literary history of its radical potential... the force of London's original claim comes from the detailed synopses of arguments that refuse to fit into received notions of the genre's evolution. London's own voice comes through in the arrangement of the voices of the dissenters and it can only enrich our knowledge of what became of literary history in the nineteenth century.' - Tommi Kakko, English Studies